I make an appearance in the latest Skritter newsletter discussing my experience learning Chinese. I did not choose the headline though.

For anyone interested in learning Chinese or Japanese, I definitively recommend Skritter. I started using it almost exactly 6 months ago now, and I have picked up a bit over 2400 characters.

Talking with a friend about babies some time ago she mentioned that young kids pick up 10 words every day., which of course is amazing. It's generally acknowledged that learning languages is something that kids do much easier than adults, but thinking about it, I've been picking up 13 characters a day on average, and about 35 words a day at my current rate. As an adult, I find that mind-boggling. So language learning at a similar speed or even faster is certainly possible for an adult. Of course, I need to make a conscious studying effort, rather than just existing within an environment where a language is spoken around me. But even so, using an effective method, which Skritter does, can get you a long way, even as an adult. Of course, YMMV, and maybe the reason I ended up in the newsletter was because I was a power user well above the average, with a consistent learning curve. The average user may have a harder time. Certainly, having a Chinese wife and Chinese spoken around me on a daily basis kind of helps. And I also believe you need a traditional school course as a basis to get going. Words and characters is great, but you do need grammar too.

It's been a while since the last time I uploaded new cubemaps, but that doesn't mean I haven't been shooting any since then. I've just not kept up with uploading new ones. And not too long ago I also discovered that I had unsorted source material for over 20 cubemaps lying around that I hadn't touched. Some of those are in this batch of new cubemaps. Today I'm adding another 11 cubemaps, but I have more in the pipeline coming soon.

A little while back I was appointed Head of Research at Avalanche Studios, which is now also official externally. What this means is that I will focus mostly on forward-looking R&D going forward, sometimes going down paths that aren't necessarily always going to result in anything useful in the end, but hopefully also sometimes yielding results that are worthy of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. I'm very happy that our studio is prepared to spend resources outside of the safe zone and aim a bit further. It's truly a great privilege.

In addition to research and publications I will also try to increase our presence on conferences. As I mentioned earlier, I will speak at GDC next week. Hope to see you all there. I also hope to be able to contribute on many more conferences and hopefully even dragging a few of my coworkers along once in a while.

I will speak at GDC on the topic "Low-Level Thinking in High-Level Shading Languages". The scheduling for GDC is not complete, so day and time is yet to be determined, but the session description can be found here.

For quite some time my texture library (consisting mostly of cubemaps) has been licensed under a fairly permissive but custom "license" stated in the readme.txt file. As a result I've been getting a steady trickle of emails from people asking for permission to use them in commercial apps or even hobby projects. So far I've never denied anyone the use and my intention has always been to provide something for free for everyone to use. The only thing I've wanted is credit for my work. So I finally got around to update the license to something more standard to simplify for everyone, including myself. So from now on I'm using a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This license allows commercial use, so you no longer need to ask for permission for that. I am still of course interested in knowing where they might end up, so feel free to email me anyway if you include them in your project or application.